Critical Reviews of Angelo Marchetti, Painter (1930

Dino Villani - "Parliamoci," 1971

"In the drawings and paintings he showed at the Galleria La Cripta (1971), Angelo Marchetti revealed his commitment to making us feel man straining in the effort to free himself from the weight and constraints of matter, in the attempt to recover the pure spirit from which he was born. The graphic discourse of the drawings is conducted with the contour line alone, to mark the expression of the figures, while in the paintings the artist avails himself of every means, (strong drawing, daring perspectives, vivid contrasts, vibrant colours, tightly knit compositions) to prove the more effective.
A serious artist who fights his battle like a crusader: with authority and firmness, yet carrying his artistic maturity forward as well, for he knows that one can become more persuasive through a beguiling language." (Dino Villani - from the magazine "Parliamoci")

Translated from the original Italian

Luigi Bracchi - Milan, July 1971

... At the Galleria La Cripta, Angelo Marchetti exhibits for the first time, presenting large symbolic paintings boldly sketched, with the inescapable horses that have always been his favourite inspiration. The impetus of this extremely resolute painting guarantees future developments for this new painter who comes forward so courageously into the limelight. Milan, 5 July 1971 Luigi Bracchi

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Alfredo Marchesi - Milan, 27 March 1973

The powers of the mind, the intellect, genius, are the greatest forces that Nature, created by God, distributes to the human race.
His appearance, (the last animal created by God in His likeness) on all fours, foraging, bewildered, lost nothing for all that.
He concentrated, grew, multiplied, understood himself. He began to scratch marks upon the boulders, to clothe himself, and, out of the necessity of life, to extend the intricate tangle of the heap of his powers.
The way had its beginning. The pairing was created (Art-Man). You, Angelo Marchetti, whose life rises towards the sublime while still of an unripe age; it is as if you were venturing into a dense wood where the light filters faintly among the centuries-old trees, where the horizon is barely glimpsed, now serene, now overcast with clouds. Only at the setting of the sun do you notice that the day is drawing to its close, by the slanting position that leaves the summits in shadow, filtering through the sparser trunks.
You return home gathering the canvases barely sketched, and follow the path flanked by the stream that gives you joy at the sight of it; you hear the murmur of the water flowing down to the plain, which gives you that sense of well-being and a tranquillity for your work.
Your sensibility, the gathering of images, conjured by the imagination, your artistic capacity which we observe upon your canvases, make us partakers in the delight of the spirit, forgetting for a moment the bitterness of everyday life...
...You did not lead yourself; you followed the truth that God favours and that we all admire; you have reached the highest peaks an artist can attain, making yourself a Master of the future generations that will devote themselves to the study of the Fine Arts."(Alfredo Marchesi) - Milan, 27 March 1973

Translated from the original Italian

Giuseppe Nasillo

"More than figurative exhibitions in the traditional sense of the term, Angelo Marchetti's compositions are events that lay out spiritual forces in antagonism with one another." (Giuseppe Nasillo)

Translated from the original Italian

Ettore Ceruti

"I believe one could not better define Marchetti's pictorial work than as a stupendous journey through the infinite worlds of the spirit. He always succeeds in giving us, in a well-balanced and harmonious spatiality, a depth of feeling which, in light tones, warm and vibrant, bent on evoking his subjects within an aura of pure poetry, is expressed lovingly and, we might say, religiously. What strikes one in him is the vigour of ideas that imposes itself upon the senses and clothes the phantoms of imagination in the concrete; evident, too, is the continuous effort to impoverish and pare down the colour, with the sure aim of asserting the construction and the offering of an infinity of feelings and of splendours of beauty, which from the eyes descends into the soul, chastening every temptation of effect and of chromatic excess. His painting is born, therefore, of a travail, of a yearning towards an absolute purity..."(Ettore Ceruti)

Translated from the original Italian

Renato Cuzzoni - Milan, 19 February 1975

The art of Angelo Marchetti appears to us simple and complex at one and the same time. This Milanese artist, no longer in his first youth, who has no long habit of solo exhibitions for the simple reason that his retiring nature never attached much importance to them, presents himself at last with a thoroughly compelling survey of his most recent production; not a retrospective, then, since his earlier works are by now untraceable, well placed yet dispersed as they are among a multitude of collectors, small and great alike. For this is a painter surrounded by an ardent consensus of observers, not unknown to the public, from the most cultivated and culturally prepared to the most unschooled, though perhaps for that very reason the more sensitive and spontaneously honest.
The man Marchetti is shy, but the mild gaze with which he observes the world and those he speaks with might nonetheless prove deceptive, the audacity of Marchetti the painter being of a disconcerting virulence, beyond all possible imagining.
A man of few readings, but essential ones; the Gospel above all! And therefore, just as the divine testimony of a transcendent reality was spread abroad by the evangelists through a plain language within reach of every mind, even the most untutored, so the themes of our painter are treated with traditional forms and figures, leaving not the slightest room for expressive uncertainty; and the discourse is born and unfolds with evident simplicity and clarity, in a constant concern to be understood by anyone; because true great art lies precisely here, that is, in being purged of every pseudo-philosophical lucubration, of itself destined only for the abstruse élites of para-culture, who make no history but only tedium, neurosis and paranoia.
The painting of Angelo Marchetti rests on a drawing of the highest quality and force, set down almost in a single rush -so it would seem- and spontaneously, to lend expressive support to an idea that has burst forth in the artist's spirit and is at once realised with vehemence, at an incredible speed of execution. They are horses that gallop, that rear, that struggle, and riders who fight in furious mêlées, and men who writhe in pain, tortured, wronged, humiliated, and squalid, gaunt Don Quixotes.
The forms are heightened and deformed and powerfully declamatory; a sculptural symbolism that signifies, with great effectiveness, the eternal dualism of the human condition: the two realities that represent the focal points of humanity's life: the instinctive and predominantly outward one, where the primordial instincts of sex, of hatred, of violence are unleashed, and the spiritual one, and therefore inward, of awareness, of balance and of choice, in a cathartic overcoming of the necessity of matter towards an ideal of perfection and love.
The technique with which Angelo Marchetti makes his paintings is simple: lean colours, almost without body or thickness; one senses that the painter conceives his works on a large scale, to give greater prominence to his sculptural structures and his daring perspectives, set down thus in the anxiety to tell, devoid of compositional studies, preparatory sketches or anything else, almost in the Impressionist manner. The brushstroke is always dramatic; a possible error; even if evident or easily corrected, is always left in place, to make the pictorial discourse more incisive on the theme the artist has meditated upon and long reflected on.
Francis Bacon once said that "the painting is like a trap, which has closed, suddenly and at the moment chosen by the artist, upon a human fact and otherwise." All this fits the art of Angelo Marchetti perfectly. In his trap he has shut horses, men, the struggle and the suffering of creatures, their longing for love, the inbuilt suffering of matter yearning for the transcendent divine. Stupendous and evocative traps, these, in which one loses oneself -the author himself and the public alike- as in a labyrinth never to emerge from again, in the continual expectation of the miraculous appearing of a new light of truth from the depths of the last corridor, the darkest, the most sightless. RENATO CUZZONI Milan, 19 February 1975

Translated from the original Italian

Ettore Ceruti - Milan, 27 March 1976

My friendship with Marchetti and my familiarity with his art depend, in large part, on the curiosity aroused in me by his temperament, generous often to the point of squandering his own work, and at times heedless of "managing himself." In any case, the freedom and variety of means with which he assailed his artistic passion always remained, for me, exceptional and astonishing, with works at once refined and barbaric, candid and impetuous, all resolved with enormous impetus and enthusiasm. In sculpture on copper and iron especially, he seemed to give vent to this first weave of his, genuinely primitive yet fabulous and poetic; and it is not easy to convey the fascination of these great splinterings of iron and copper, of these themes of warriors, and in particular the Don Quixote in full repoussé, made without the aid of a deep and conscious culture, without ever having read Cervantes, and entrusted solely to a world of fables told to him and taken up in steel, yet no less deeply felt and powerful for that, and rendered like a raging sculptural suffocation. On the other hand, it was precisely this impetuous labour of memory and imagination that alerted the artist to the need for a greater figurative legibility, for the search for a far more elegiac and tranquil relationship. When the poetic world came to seem to him inwardly provisional, he came to realise that this provisionality was one and the same with the forms he had accepted more than he had personally conquered them, even if the acceptance had been enthusiastic. From then on there surfaces the problem of a fulfilled inner fingering, of a constantly felt need for spiritual formation, which only through painting could inevitably find the renewal of his whole world as the vital root of his feeling, a direction taken up ever more coherently and with lucid and impassioned faith. I believe one could not better define Marchetti's pictorial work than as a stupendous journey through the infinite worlds of the spirit. He always succeeds in giving us, in a well-balanced and harmonious spatiality, a depth of feeling which, in light tones, warm and vibrant, bent on evoking his subjects within an aura of pure poetry, is expressed lovingly and, we might say, religiously. What strikes one in him is the vigour of ideas that imposes itself upon the senses and clothes the phantoms of imagination in the concrete; evident, too, is the continuous effort to impoverish and pare down the colour, with the sure aim of asserting the construction and the offering of an infinity of feelings and of splendours of beauty, which from the eyes descends into the soul, chastening every temptation of effect and of chromatic excess. His painting is born, therefore, of a travail, of a yearning towards an absolute purity. One must grant the artist, as an act of consistency with the work carried out thus far, that from an initial creative fury, often dramatic in its search for a reality-poetry relationship that might find resolution in his conscience, he may at times even have erred, but he has gone on experimenting with vividness, commitment and sincerity, to the point of giving meaning and dignity to his aesthetic meditation.Ettore Ceruti - Milan 27 March 1976

Translated from the original Italian

Antonino De Bono - "Il Vertice" gallery, 1977

"The distinctive trait of Angelo Marchetti is to confer upon his pictorial undertaking a mystical impulse of love, to permeate his images with a fine luminous fabric, to set the spiritual essences vibrating, together with the bodies thrust forward as the vanguard of life, within irrational atmospheres laden with metaphysical tensions.
He is the artist par excellence who identifies himself with the Ariostan verse, without rhetoric or false literary trappings; he is the singer of those \"ladies, knights, arms, loves, courtesies, bold deeds..." narrated with poetic impetus and visionary enthusiasm, having as his goal not the epic celebration of history but the exalting nostalgia for a lost Apollonian civilisation, for an extraordinary unfolding of legend that hovers in a pre-logical and timeless age.
Mythic knights, sturdy and clad tight in robust armour, their heads enclosed in kettle-helms or sparrow-beak or conical bascinets with cheek-guards, lances couched, set out to conquer turreted cities magically suspended in the air as in a mirage.
Bodies of heroes and titans, of warriors and workshop labourers, in unexpected solutions, emerge from the depths of the centuries or rise from the bowels of our own time: sculptural, volumetric, bearing in their flesh the transfiguring Luciferian ardour of enthusiasms for ideal revolts carried out with divine boldness.
Horses with a feral gaze, snarling and fiery in action, sprung from the cosmic wounds of time like frenzied images of the ancient Dionysian tragedy. How perfect, prancing and rearing in its fall, is the steed that unseats the apostle Paul, struck down by the Redeemer on the road to Damascus. Its hooves are sunken, delirium in its sockets, slavering sweat on the velvety skin, arabesqued with the glimmering tints of night.
Luxuriant the female nudes, gathered into the arch of the back; voluptuous the forms evoked in a continual Hellenistic striving, as a recovery of the "Lysippan" and "Praxitelean" motifs of closed rhythms drawn together as compositional units. What pleases, then, in Angelo Marchetti is the phenomenal doubling of the being tossed between reality and fantasy, enraptured between allegory and myth, raised to a symbol at times within the harsh social condition, the event always related to an inventive conception that breaks away entirely from tradition to rise to a cosmic, "expressionistic" moment of the pictorial effect. The artist loves to confer upon his works a transfiguring amber colouring that calls forth romantic solemnities, inspired by a shrewd play of raking light, by the shivers that the landscape and the surrounding space give off, kindling warm vibrations that wind off into the infinite, delighting in themselves the balanced masses, the bodies of men and animals, the compositions witty and rich in ancient wisdom ("The Grape-Harvesters," "Harlequin and Pierrot," "Every Man's Struggles," "The Habitat," etc.). The sense of drama prevails in his work, the awareness of feeling and of passion, of sorrow and of sin, of redemption and celestial rapture: a procession of characters, of invocations, of allusions, of interweavings rises from the "human comedy" brought out by Angelo Marchetti with "Aeschylean" rapture. As if to hear the "suppliants," the "throngs," the "choephoroe" and the "corybantes," as in Greek dramaturgy, advancing, narrating, beseeching with poetic sensibility. "The Death of Abel" belongs to this sublime Panic exaltation of tragedy, as the martyr's muscles crumble and his fingers turn to dust and fix themselves to the earth; "The Madonna with the Divine Child," austere and melancholy, fruit of the mystic rose, emerged from a suffused murmur of tones. Everywhere there predominates a convulsed, orgiastic, obsessive nature, a source of corpuscular rays, of chiaroscuro effects vigorous and softened with emotion. Superb, an interpreter of horses in struggle, desperately flung into their last gallop. Composed, prepared, subtle, dazzling in the graphic line, with a mordant sense of irony and satire. A painter of vivid imagination, noble in the fluency of his images, of fluid and soft touch, of perfect draughtsmanly framework without neoclassical affectation, Angelo Marchetti enjoys a well-deserved renown for his spontaneous vein, rich with a vital sap saturated with an eternal luminism."(Antonino De Bono)

Translated from the original Italian

Renato Cuzzoni

Biography and artistic personality: Angelo Marchetti was born on 10 January 1930 in Milan (though only the following day was he registered with the civil registry of the Municipality of Milan).
Alternating the work of painter with that of sculptor and engraver, Angelo Marchetti has succeeded in building a personal expressive idiom in which it is hard to separate the judicious handling of drawing from the sculptural and chromatic components. In the heightened gesture of his figures deliberately deformed and irregular one readily senses the perception of polyvalent stimuli, in which impetuosity and instinct seep through at every step, as if to bring out the psychological turmoil that continually grips the human being as he walks "spinte vel sponte" beneath the impenetrable shroud of his existence. "My intent," the Milanese artist declares, "is to search, search, search, in order to discover the logic by which I find myself in the condition and the position of a man. To express oneself through a medium in my case the figured image and at the same time to weigh inwardly the positive gifts and the negative stimuli; positive, as a recognition that I truly feel as such; negative in their every sense."
A diarchic component seems continually to surface in the works of this artist, who speaks of ceaseless struggles between hedonism and suffering, between Good and Evil, between Ormazd and Ahriman, which (one must, alas, agree) are the irrepressible legacy of the existential knapsack we drag endlessly behind us. The discourse that Marchetti puts forward with commendable conviction appears still more admirable if one considers for a moment that he converses without leaning on any support of school or academic training, but only on that of a personal and continual empirical layering, earned through his commitment as a self-taught artist a commitment we know to be ever more laborious and hard-won than any course of regular study.
Thought on art. "Art represents the essence of life itself."
Thought on life. "Life is awareness, a formation directed at grasping the most important sides of existence itself."
Critical documentation. "The art of Angelo Marchetti appears to us simple and complex at one and the same time. This Milanese artist, no longer in his first youth, who has no long habit of solo exhibitions for the simple reason that his retiring nature never attached much importance to them, presents himself at last with a thoroughly compelling survey of his most recent production; not a retrospective, then, since his earlier works are by now untraceable well placed yet dispersed as they are among a multitude of collectors, small and great alike. For this is a painter surrounded by an ardent consensus of observers, not unknown to the public, from the most cultivated and culturally prepared to the most unschooled, though perhaps for that very reason the more sensitive and spontaneously honest... The technique with which Angelo Marchetti makes his paintings is simple: lean colours, almost without body or thickness; one senses that the painter conceives his works on a large scale, to give greater prominence to his sculptural structures and his daring perspectives, set down thus in the anxiety to tell, devoid of compositional studies, preparatory sketches or anything else, almost in the Impressionist manner. The brushstroke is always dramatic; a possible error, even if evident or easily corrected, is always left in place, to make the pictorial discourse more incisive on the theme the artist has meditated upon and long reflected on." (Renato Cuzzoni)

Translated from the original Italian